Kawasaki Zephyr 550
Kawasaki Zephyr 550
PRETEND, FOR A SECOND, THAT you've just ridden a 1990 Kawasaki Zephyr 550 into the time tunnel and gone back to 1979. You proudly wheel the machine onto the floor of a Kawasaki dealership and proclaim it "the standard bike of the future." What kind of reaction would you get?
Assuming that 'Billy Bob behind the counter knew what the term “standard” meant, he probably would just stick his thumbs under his suspenders and laugh. “Heck, that ain't no standard,” he'd say. “That there is a full-on sportin' machine.” And he would be right. In fact, Kawasaki would roll The KZ550 (the bike on which the Zephyr is based) into its dealers' showrooms for 1980, and it would be the wildest ride of the year, a rough equivalent to today’s ZX-6. Even though the 1 990 Zephyr and the 1980 KZ550 aren’t all that different, the way we think of motorcycles is.
Of course, techno-types will note that the Zephyr is actually quite different from the old KZ. Many of the new bike’s features are compromises between Eighties and Nineties technology. It has a twin-backbone frame—not quite a perimeter frame, but then not much like the KZ’s single-backbone frame, either. It has piggyback reservoir, adjustable-rebound-damping shocks, but there are two of them. The heart and sole of the machine are very much the same as the KZ550’s.
The Zephyr exists because Kawasaki researchers did a little homework, visiting all the motorcycle hangouts in the country and taking notes on what people were riding. They saw a lot of KZs and GPzs mimicking first-generation Superbike racers, with cut-down Corbin seats, oil coolers and 4-into-l exhaust pipes. So the company built just that: a slightly modified early-Eighties sportbike. And surprisingly enough, the Zephyr fits into 1990°quite well. It handles almost like a modern sportbike —few motorcycles can make a 10-year leap into the future and feel so good. The bike turns with precision and has acceptable ground clearance. And its twin-shock suspension delivers an excellent ride.
But when you twist the throttle on the Zephyr, the reality of the early Eighties hits all too hard. The 553cc, air-cooled, eight-valve engine seems almost gutless by today’s middleweight standards. As the'revs climb, power takes its time to make it all the way to the rear wheel. At high rpm. the Kawasaki finally gets going, but by that time, the rider has all but lost interest. The engine has the thin powerband of an all-out racer, but without the peak power to justify the sacrifice.
Is that enough to condemn the new Zephyr? That depends on your priorities. The motorcycle is smooth and comfortable (even though the Corbin-copy seat isn’t as good as the real thing.) It has excellent brakes and good suspension. There was a time when those credentials would be enough to proclaim the Zephyr as the greatest motorcycle on the road.
But that time was, after all, 10 years ago.
SPECIFICATIONS
Kawasaki Zephyr
$3999
